Research Catalog

Title

Appropriated photographs in French surrealist periodicals, 1924-1939 / Linda Steer.

Author

Steer, Linda

Publication

• Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017.
• ©2017

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 179 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"The first monograph to analyze the Surrealist gesture of photographic appropriation, this study examines "found" photographs in three French Surrealist reviews published in the 1920s and 1930s: La Révolution surréaliste, edited by André Breton; Documents, edited by Georges Bataille; and Minotaure, edited by Breton and others. The book asks general questions about the production and deployment of meaning through photographs, but addresses more specifically the construction of a Surrealist practice of photography through the gesture of borrowing and re-contextualization and reveals something crucial both about Surrealist strategies and about the way photographs operate. The book is structured around four case studies, including scientific photographs of an hysteric in Charcot's clinic at the Salpêtrière hospital, positioned as poetry rather than pathology; and one of the first crime-scene photographs, depicting Jack the Ripper's last victim, radically transformed into a work of art. Linda Steer traces the trajectory of the found photographs, from their first location to their location in a Surrealist periodical. Her study shows that the act of removal and re-framing highlights the instability and mutability of photographic meaning, an instability and mutability that has consequences for our understanding both of photography and of Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s."

Series Statement

Ashgate studies in surrealism

Uniform Title

Ashgate studies in surrealism.

Subject

• Vernacular photography

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 161-175) and index.

Contents

Introduction: surrealism's photographic unconscious -- Picturing hysteria in La Révolution surréaliste: from pathology to ecstasy -- Ethnography's photographic unconscious in Documents: savagery in civilization / civilization in savagery -- Aesthetics and horror: forensic photography in Minotaure -- From the marvelous to the monstrous: photography and the past -- Epilogue: the legacy of surrealist photographic appropriation.

Call Number

JQE 17-78

ISBN

• 1409437302
• 9781409437307

OCLC

958925826

Author

Steer, Linda, author.

Title

Appropriated photographs in French surrealist periodicals, 1924-1939 / Linda Steer.

Publisher

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017.

Copyright Date

©2017

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Ashgate studies in surrealism

Ashgate studies in surrealism.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 161-175) and index.

Research Call Number

JQE 17-78